Fintan O'Toole: Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life They are the mental equivalent of a cold shower; shocking. awful, but in some obscure way good for you, bracing you for the terrors of life and keeping your mind off bad thoughts about politics, society and the way the world changes. They are an ordeal after which you're supposed to feel better, a kind of mental muesli that cleans out the system and purges the soul. And, like muesli, they are boring, fruity and full of indigestible roughage.
The plays of William Shakespeare were written on the playing fields of Eton. Or, at least, the plays of Shakespeare as they have been taught in school, were. In the form in which most people first encounter them, Hamlet or Macbeth, King Lear or Othello are made to seem as if they have very little to do with the theatre, with the seventeenth century, with a man trying to create new rituals for a world that was changing at a frightening pace, and everything to do with building character, with the nineteenth century, with teaching us lessons about how we should behave.